Any business owner familiar with email marketing or development knows how vital a sound email system is for customers. A workflow for branded, well-run emails is essential for getting effective marketing and critical information across.
But, not all of these systems are created equal. A generic service can limit your capabilities and undermine your brand's credibility. But there is another solution.
Here, we’ll explore the benefits of an email service provider for small businesses. We'll look at ways to improve internal work and make sure you get off on the right foot with customers.
Understanding the significance of an email sending service
Small businesses need an email service that helps them appear professional to customers, secure their communications, and scale with them as they grow. But consumer email services like Outlook and Gmail don't offer the standard that most businesses need.
That's why companies of all sizes must set up a professional service dedicated to email sending for small businesses. This comes with a custom domain like yourname@yourbusiness.com and extra "business-class" security features, which we'll cover later.
With basic, premium, and custom plans, these services can also be tailor-made to your company’s needs while offering a level of security and dedicated customer service that consumer email can't.
6 benefits of email service provider for small businesses
So, what can an email service provider do for your small business? Let's look at six common benefits.
1. Boosts credibility through a professional email identity
For small businesses that aren’t well-known, it's essential to establish credibility in every communication with customers. Chances are you’ve already researched different methods and channels. Perhaps you’ve asked yourself: What channel best reflects our business offering? Can I leverage any technology or internet-based platform?
These are all essential questions, the answers to which will help shape your communications strategy. But if your business is online, you could be putting your email addresses in front of customers and potential business partners hundreds of times a day. In many cases, it will be their first impression of your company.
Whether you're B2B or B2C, your customers receive tens if not hundreds of emails daily – and they're ignoring most of them. A professional email address is essential to being taken seriously enough for customers to open your emails. After that, it will influence whether they think you're credible enough to respond to.
Additionally, simplifying email creation with an easy-to-use email editor can make a significant difference in crafting professional-looking emails that enhance your brand's image and engage your audience effectively.
2. Helps protect sensitive information with security features
Small businesses often share sensitive data like passwords and financial information over email. But using a consumer service could be putting your business communications at risk.
As the number of companies working remotely suddenly rose in the past few years, so did cybercrime. In 2020 alone, malware attacks increased by 358%, and ransomware attacks rose by 435% from 2019. Your business's cybersecurity profile is only as strong as its weakest link, and for most companies, that's email.
Email isn't fundamentally secure; it was developed in the 1970s before spam, scams, and viruses became epidemics. According to AAG the main type of cyberattack is ransomware, where hackers will take control of all files on a company's server and threaten to leak or delete them unless a ransom is paid. In most cases, the hacker breaks into the system because of a suspicious email.
This is a business-level threat that consumer email services don't address. While services like Gmail have added some security protections, businesses need more.
In lieu of a better solution, businesses often use email to share sensitive details like company credit card details, personal identifying information, and passwords. But if you’re giving an employee the keys to powerful tools or even social media passwords, you need to know those messages won’t be intercepted.
A dedicated email sending platform for small businesses offers more robust security features, such as end-to-end encryption, anti-phishing measures, a better spam filter, malware scanning, and multi-factor authentication, all of which can be tailored to your needs.
They also give business owners more control over where their data is stored and how it's used, which is a concern for companies working with sensitive data in regulated sectors. With your own email sending solution, you have extra protection in an ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape.
3. Enhances email availability improving brand trust
Many businesses rely on email for everything from customer support to marketing. So naturally, it has to be ready to serve every customer’s needs 100% of the time.
If you’re running your email on a consumer service like Google Workspace, you might not experience glitches often. But when you do, they could cause issues throughout the entire business. On top of this, there’s no dedicated customer service team to help you get back online as soon as possible.
When you have a good email sending service, you can trust that your brand is in safe hands. The solutions offer better assurances around uptime and might even have a money-back guarantee if things do go wrong. So when customers are expecting an email on events like purchases or resetting their password, you can be sure they receive it in good time. These may seem like small things, but they’ll help reinforce your image as a reliable and trustworthy brand.
4. Provides scalability for better business growth
As your company grows, you need solutions that can scale with you. For example, a small business that undergoes expansion may find that its customer base grows too quickly for the customer support team to keep up. That’s why businesses will invest in a call center solution provider to automatically route calls to the right department, improve the productivity of staff, and ensure the customer experience doesn’t suffer.
Have you considered whether your email service provider can scale with you? As the business grows, your support team is no longer going to just be john@yourbusiness.com; you’re going to need a support@yourbusiness.com that can field requests to the right person at the right time based on their schedule.
You can’t do that with a support@gmail.com email address because that’s already taken. You could do it with yourbusiness-support@gmail.com, but does this create a positive and professional image for customers?
With a hosted domain you’re free to add short, memorable addresses to your domain that can serve whatever needs come up as you scale. Moreover, some email sending services even offer dedicated hosting options for businesses with specific requirements, ensuring even greater control and security.
5. Reduces costs with subscription options
Consumer email is free up until a certain storage limit that most individuals will never hit. But businesses using this are paying in needless legwork and missed opportunities.
Email service providers help companies make more sales and work more effectively, and they come with pricing plans to suit businesses at any scale.
Usually, that will be a range from the basic plan to a premium plan with features like unlimited email accounts per user. Different providers can give you more value for money by bundling in other benefits like email templates, integration support, and other advanced features. This can save you from paying for other email apps that have one or two features you need.
For example, a company that’s a target for attacks like phishing emails can get advanced security features and spam protection. For companies in regulated sectors, an email provider offers customizable retention periods that make sure records of all communication are kept for as long as they’re needed.
Using an email sending service is also cheaper than running your own dedicated servers. It's the same story as any other cloud computing service: because the email provider runs the same infrastructure for thousands of customers, they're able to spread the cost and charge less than you'd pay to host yourself.
In addition, since they're competing with other providers for a fairly simple service, they're incentivized to invest in the best physical and cyber security money can buy while offering extra perks like dedicated customer service, saving you money in the long run.
6. Improves accessibility and mobility for users
With a remote workforce, businesses must be on top of digital communication like never before.
As a result, long-standing tools like telecoms are experiencing a digital transformation. Services like the 8x8 business phone offer advanced features including virtual phone numbers that let remote staff take calls on desktop, tablet, or mobile devices.
Once those channels are digital, there’s so much more you can do with them. Tools like Slack, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Teams help centralize communication in part by integrating with all these channels and whichever email apps your team prefers to use.
But managing dozens of logins per user becomes unwieldy. An email gives each staff member one key to the whole kingdom of apps and services they need. Many of these apps are built for administrators using custom domains, which makes it easy for you to set granular permissions around who can do what.
Key takeaways
Branding, collaboration, cost-effectiveness, security – investing in a dedicated email service provider for small businesses has numerous benefits. And if your brand has ambitions to scale, email platform is a must.
Custom domains can help you win vital sales in your first few years while ensuring company data is safe and boosting your brand image and reputation. Find the best plan for you, and your email will help you scale up operations as the business grows.
About the author
Alwayne Powell is an experienced performance marketing leader with an extensive background in the digital space, working client and agency side to provide paid search, SEO, and CRO solutions in the B2B and B2C sectors. They are the current Senior Digital Marketing Manager at leading communication platform provider 8x8. Alwayne has written for other domains such as ScribeHow and Divante. You can find them on LinkedIn.
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